Tag: AudioAssignments1423

This was the first assignment I chose to do this week and man was it an interesting one! The basic gist of this one was to take any song and slow it down a ton and see what it sounds like. For a while now I have loved the song Secrets by One Republic. The instrumental intro to the song is amazing to me and so great to listen to. I wanted to find out what it would sounds like slowed down so much (I really had no idea what it would sound like). So for this whole week I decided to use Audacity and found that it is a super useful tool. The first thing to do is open Audacity and import the MP3 of WAV file for the song that you want to use. It should look something like this when you import your song. For each song the highs and lows will be different so that will look a little different.

Next you click on the track in Audacity, go up to the Effects tab and choose change tempo. We want to set the percent to -98% because we are slowing down the song. If you put a positive number in there, it will speed up the song. Also, make sure you check the box for “Use high quality stretching.” It makes the end result a bit cleaner.

Click ok and let it do its thing (it will take a while). When it is done stretching the song out. It will probably be super long (in my case it ended up somewhere around 3 hours). To fix this, you can simply highlight the parts you don’t want and hit the scissors icon (cut). And that is it! You have your slowed down song. And in my case, the end result was amazing. By slowing down the orchestral intro to the song, it made it so deep and powerful. The sound echoes and is so empowering. It is almost like there is a song within each song. By slowing down one song, I got a completely different one that is just as amazing as the original. Give it a listen here: